The following disclosure relates generally to spell checking technologies and, more particularly, to a system and method for discerning a term for an entry having a spelling error.
In the art, systems and method for correcting spelling errors are known. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,144,958, entitled “System And Method For Correcting Spelling Errors In Search Queries,” describes a search engine that uses correlations between search terms to correct misspelled terms within search queries. The correlations are based at least in-part on historical query submissions to the search engine. Preferably, the correlations reflect the frequencies with which the search terms have historically appeared together within the same query. In operation, when a query is submitted to the search engine, a spelling correction process accesses the correlation table to generate a list of terms that are deemed to be related to the matching term(s). The spellings of these related terms are then compared to the spelling of each non-matching term using a spelling comparison function that compares two character strings and generates a similarity score. More specifically, the spelling comparisons are performed using an ordered anagram-type spelling comparison function including all of the vowels and consonants (e.g., “Appalachian” is stored as “aaaachilnpp” for use in the comparison process). A similarity score takes into account the fact that misspellings typically result from the insertion of an extra letter, omission of a letter, and/or transposition of letters. If a suitable replacement is found for a given non-matching term, the non-matching term is replaced with the similar related term.
Still further, U.S. Pat. No. 5,765,180, entitled “Method And System For Correcting The Spelling Of Misspelled Words,” describes maintaining a list or dictionary of misspelled words and associated, correctly spelled words. When a misspelled word is encountered during the spell checking of a word processing document, the system searches the list for the misspelled word. If the misspelled word is in the list, the system replaces the word in the document with the associated, correctly spelled word. The described system also provides a method for adding misspelled words and associated, correctly spelled words to the list.